‘Logan’s Life Plan’
Lyft CEO has an idea far bigger than ride-hailing services
SAN FRANCISCO — Logan Green applied for his first job out of college by submitting a resume and a document titled “Logan’s Life Plan.”
Absent were typical life goals: owning a nice house, taking lavish vacations, starting a huge company. Instead, it called for creating a sustainability newsletter, serving on transportation and greenhouse gases subcommittees, and getting funding for solar panels on dorm roofs.
“He definitely stood out,” said University of California at Santa Barbara vice chancellor Marc Fisher, who hired Green more than 10 years ago. “Espe- cially for his age, he had a lot of poise, and the combination of his intellect and social capacity was extremely unusual.”
Now 32, Green runs Lyft, a ride-hailing business that plans to do away with car ownership, first by getting Americans to share rides, then eventually by having fleets of self-driving cars offer carpools at the tap of a button. The ambitious plan has drawn big bucks from investors, including $500 million from General Motors that brought the company’s valuation to $5.5 billion.
Green, co-founder and chief executive of Lyft, has long obsessed with making the world cleaner, greener and more efficient, said Matt Van Horn, a friend of Green’s since high school. “Transportation was a big one for him,” Van Horn said. “He’s one of the only people I know who knew how to take a bus in L.A.”
Growing up, Green learned to sit in traffic — first in the car seat, then in the back seat, then, when he got his license, in the driver’s seat. Traffic was all anyone around him seemed to talk about. It was a fact of life, the trade-off for yearround sunshine in one of the most lively cities in America.
Green was the kid who transcended social circles. He played ice hockey with the jocks, but also loved science and taught himself to code. He was the sweet kid, the calm kid, the eighth-grade kid who asked his parents to move the